Dogland | Page 9

Minnesota, a small town about a hundred miles from the farm where Pa grew up.
Ma's favorite story about Grandma Letitia was of a Sunday afternoon when they had gone driving. Grandma Letitia had seen a sign advertising a new soft drink, 7-Up, and she had said, "What's Zup?" Grandpa Abner had smiled and said, "I don't know, dear. What's up?" "No," said Grandma Letitia, pointing adamantly at the billboard. "What's Zup? What's Zup?"
Ma was an only child, so she had no stories to tell about brave or foolish siblings. She had been a happy and an obedient child, and as the daughter of one of the three richest families in town (the druggist comes after the two other wealthy Ds of every small town, the doctor and the dentist), Ma had been protected.
But Ma knew one story whose mystery I had never appreciated. Grandma Letitia was one of four Kuster girls. The oldest, Rose, had been a journalist for a good newspaper. Rose Kuster was a tall, independent woman, the quintessence of the 1920s free women. She wore short, fringed dresses; she bobbed her hair; she smoked cigarettes and raced roadsters; she kept her father's Colt .45 in her luggage. She never married. Grandma Letitia thought her oldest sister was a scandal and a delight.
Sometime between the two world wars, Rose Kuster took an ocean liner to Europe and never arrived. No one knew what happened to her, whether she fell overboard, was thrown, or threw herself. Her trunk came back to the U.S. without any hint of the fate of its owner.
Maybe I never appreciated the story because Ma would suggest that Rose had lost her memory and married a count, or had run away with a man who had not won Rose's father's approval. Those conclusions could not compare with struggling to land a shot-up B-12 in the dark hills of Italy. Only when I was older did I think of a moonless night on the ocean, and a ship cruising away while a dance band played a fox trot, and a woman in an evening gown swimming gamely after it, knowing her cries and the waving of her hand would never be noticed.
Only one set of family stories remains to be told before my story begins. These are the stories I learned as a child about Susan Genevieve Uvdal and Luke H. Nix.
When Ma graduated from high school, she went hundreds of miles away to the city, to Minneapolis. At the University, she danced late into the night at fraternity parties and hotel ballrooms, and eventually, homesick, she returned to her parents' house. She became a Wave during the second World War. In photos of her in uniform, she looks like Judy Garland, another Minnesotan. After the war, with three others whom she called girls but who must have been young women, she spent a summer driving through Mexico. Handsome men were always available to help them whenever they had trouble with their car. When Ma returned to Minnesota, she was engaged several times, but she always found the men too stolid to marry.
Pa stayed in the Merchant Marine for some time after the war. In Germany, he was jumped by two men, perhaps for his money. Pa knocked one down, straddled his chest, and tightened his fingers around the man's throat. The second man kicked Pa in the chin, so Pa banged the first man's head against the cobblestones. They repeated this like figures in a cuckoo clock striking an hour that would not end. At last, the first German quit kicking Pa and carried away his friend, or maybe the Military Police arrived. That night left Pa with a patch of mottled skin on his jaw where his beard would never grow.
When he left the Merchant Marine, he came back to northern Minnesota, but not to the family farm. He rented a cabin on Lake of the Woods, and he bought a used red MG convertible, the only sports car in several counties. One summer, he and his brothers and sisters put on the first water-skiing show on Lake of the Woods. His cabin became the county's weekend party house. He lived the life Uncle Mark might have led.
Pa was tending bar at the Nitehawk on the evening he met Ma. She came in with another man, and when Pa asked her what she'd like, she said, "In Minneapolis, they knew how to make highballs, but no one knows how to make them up here."
Pa said, "Sister, if you can drink 'em, I can build 'em."
That was probably the true moment of my conception.
Chapter Two
In the Foundations of Dream
At the Florida welcome station, three pretty women with their hair piled high on their heads gave us smiles and small paper cups of orange juice. When